Tuesday, March 10, 2009

If you are using M$ Outlook as your mail client, and your email inbox is increasing every day,you might experience sluggish operations when opening Outlook.Note : This article is for Outlook users, not for Outlook Express. Most users whom purchased M$ Office should have M$ Outlook also. Outlook Express is built-in with Windows XP.

At times, it even hang or refuse to respond when you click on the Outlook icon to open the application. One of the possible solution to this problem is that you can use the built-in "Inbox Repair Tool"

The Inbox Repair Tool or scanpst.exe is located at

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033

If you are unable to find the scanpst.exe file, you may consider downloading from here.

A PST file aka "Personal Storage Table" is actually a the file which contains all your emails and its subfolders within Outlook itself. Outlook organizes the emails and folders within a PST file. By default, when a new email address is created for receiving mails in Outlook, an "Outlook.pst" file is created.

Before running the scanpst.exe file, it is recommended to close Outlook first. If Outlook had not started properly, you should use "Task Manager" to end the Outlook.exe task.

Once you open the scanpst.exe file, you will need to tell the Inbox Repair Tool where to find the PST file. Outlook usually creates this file in a folder within the current user's working directory.

Once the scanning starts, it'd take some time depending on the number of emails which are in your INBOX and its subfolders. When it completes its scanning, it'll prompt the user for actions.It is recommended to create a backup of the original Outlook.pst file before beginning to repair.

Once this is done, Outlook should be able to start normally.

To have proper housekeeping of Outlook inbox emails and subfolder emails, it is recommended to "regularly" archive your emails by creating another PST file to store older emails and to delete emails which are no longer relevant or no longer needed to keep for records.

After the deletion of emails and emptying of the deleted items folder , the PST file should be compacted to recover the space.

For ridding yourself of the Outlook problems, you can consider one of the following opensource email clients for XP/Vista/NT etc:

4 comments:

Advise try next tool-inbox repair tool pst,it is free as far as i know,utility extract data from corrupted files with *.pst or *.ost extension,will be prompted to choose a file to be repaired, it may be files in *.ost or *.pst format,tool will decrypt the input file and attempt to extract all data, that is located inside,extract data safely, even if your *.ost file is infected, however, antivirus software should be installed on your PC,save recovered data, first of all, you can convert it to a *.pst file, that can be opened by any email client, compatible with Microsoft Outlook,also extract a great number of files in *.eml,*.vcf and *.txt formats,may help us to improve these Microsoft Outlook pst repair tools.

You can also try another advanced and most effective Outlook PST Repair software which is a powerful yet simple email recovery software that can repair and restore corrupted outlook PST files in an easy and quick way.